I had a couple of Matchbox Comet models, plus a third one I bought from a hobby store in a bag of "used" models for dirt cheap.  The used model was missing 4 of the road wheels on one side.  Except for a game played many years ago in Ottawa (), and some of the games from many years ago, the two original models had seen little action.  So when April came home from Michigan in August 2003 after a visit there with 5 Cromwells she'd got for me at Old Guard Hobbies (this link may be dead as Old Guardhas sadly closed down in Detroit), I figured I had to add to the Cromwell muster by adding a turret to the existing Comets.

Normally when I do this sort of thing, I prefer to, of course, make a new turret or a case mate and just plop it on the existing model so I get two AFVs for the price of one!  However, those dumb asses who designed the Comet had no respect for the hordes of modellers that were to follow after WWII and decided to add return rollers to the Cromwell chassis to produce the Comet.  Thanks to that characteristic, I really could not follow my usual approach and it was necessary to forever change these models so that they could never go back to being Comets.

Rather sad, actually, in a warped way, don't you think?

Three of these things belong together, three of these things are kind of the same,
Can you guess which thing just doesn't belong here...(etc)

To make the conversion, I simply made turrets out of plastic card - it was very simple, since the Cromwell's turret is a slab sided angular thing with no real curves.   The big frankenstein bolts all over the Cromwell's turret are ends of narrow plastic dowels and the other bits such as the commander's cupola were cut or scribed from varying thicknesses of plastic card.  I used a geometry set divider to score a circular pattern from a thick chunk of plastic card.  The guns were made from stretched dowels as were the muzzle brakes.

I covered the guns in cam nets, not to cover any bad craftsmanship on my part for the gun barrels, but because the Comet hull has a tow cable moulded into the glacis which I didn't want to sand or Dremel off for fear of ruining the plate.  So, based on pictures I've seen on Cromwells in the european theatre, I draped cam net over the nose.  Because the same pictures I modelled the cam nets from also had them wrapped around the gun, I followed suit.  There's also a bit of cam net on the rear decking.  This was to cover really lousy jobs I did of trying to sand off the moulded gun crutch in the Matchbox model.

The cam net was medical gauze, soaked in Scenic Cement from Woodland Scenics, sprayed with light earth paint, and finally lightly flocked with flocking material, also from Woodland Scenics.

The return rollers were cracked off and the top run of the tracks glued to the top of the road wheels  to produce the same sort of sag the Revell model's individual track link tracks produces.  That was the mod that prohibited their return to their original subject matter.  Because the models were old, I had to reconstruct the hull MGs as well.

The missing wheels were cast from high temperature glue gun glue, using a form I built up using latex rubber over an existing wheel.